SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
You want to free up resources for either one? Start with global military spending and the financial sector. Both have their place and both have grown far beyond it.
Rocket engines, hypersonic vehicles, and orbital rockets have a dual use for missile technology ( both conventional and nuclear )
Considering we don't even have fission rockets or airplanes in normal use, making a fusion powerplant that is light enough to get off the ground seems very far fetched.
Even if we eventually use fusion for travel beyond earth orbit, I'd bet chemical rockets would still be in use.
Don't we already have thrusters that are useful in space, but completely unable to support themselves against 1G and so they can't lift off from the ground?
I feel like I've read something that said fusion power would fall in the same category.
Yes. For example ion thrusters have specific impulse that is like an order of magnitude or two (or three?) better than chemical rockets, but they can't lift anything out of the atmosphere.
> I feel like I've read something that said fusion power would fall in the same category.
Sorry I have no idea about that.
As absurd as it sounds nuclear powered aircraft engines are a thing.[1] They have also been proposed for spacecraft, Scott Manley does a great video talking about nuclear rocket engines[2].
Safety is a very valid concern for any supersized airborne vehicle but especially a nuclear powered one! However, this is one department where scale in itself brings it's own benefits. The volume increases faster than the surface area so you could have a hull far thicker than that of many naval ships while still having a truly vast interior volume. Not needing to ever land also reduces avenues for sabatoge and presumably the craft's interior itself would be heavily compartmentalized. You can also optimise your hull to deal with a narrow air pressure range which you cannot do with normal craft which need to be able to handle a wide range from ground level to the stratospheric.
Fusion still shares the same fundumental problem that chemical rockets or even more advanced options like blackhole or antimatter drives face - the rocket equation. We need to use near term reusable launch vehicles like the Starship to help set up the required launch assist structures that would make genuine mass transit of people and cargo into orbit possible.
Things like skyhooks, lofstroom loops, and eventually orbital rings that would allow people to ride trains or cable cars from an earth city straight into orbit for the same price range as intercity travel today. Needless to say, that is not going to happen until there is enough of an industry up there to justify the large upfront costs of such megaprojects (especially the orbital ring) so the Starship is our best near term hope of getting us up to that point.
Note that none of these projects require advanced materials or new technologies (as opposed to the space elevator that is likely to remain science fiction when it comes to dealing with a body with the gravity well of earth anyway), they're just massive engineering projects.
"Today’s best chemical rockets produce propellant exhaust velocities up to 4.5 km/s. Fission (nuclear thermal) rocket engines could roughly double that, to about 8.5 km/s. A working nuclear fusion core producing thrust through direct exhaust of hot plasma, could readily generate up to ~1000 km/s exhaust velocities" - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10894-015-0034-1
Likely necessary for advanced space flight. Likely necessary to allow for "clean energy" on earth. Unlike advances to flamethrowers.
They only come into their own once they are already in space or in orbit which returns us to the problem that we need to have launch assist infrastructure that can deal with that first step without resorting to those "flamethrowers" as you call them.
It's also not true at all that fusion is necessary to allow for clean energy (even ignoring that many of the near term fusion reactor designs still need to have radiation shielding to deal with dangerous neutron emissions). We could use a combination of renewable sources and nuclear fission to deal with the energy crisis now and then utilise fusion once it's finally matured to the point of usefulness. Indeed, we could use that orbital infrastructure to help construct a planetary cloud of solar collectors that can operate 24/7 and beam that energy down via microwave rectiner technology that is already capable of achieving greater than 85% energy conversion (keep in mind that we lose far more energy simply from the diffusion of sunlight through the atmosphere). This approach not only can power the earth but any off earth colonisation prospects with line of sight with our planetary cloud - without needing to haul the likely massive early generation fusion reactors.
Neither is fusion necessary for advanced space travel. It would be very useful but chiefly for travel to under-developed sectors of the solar system. solar reflectors scaled up enough can be used to speed up and slow down entire fleets of ships with far higher potential top speeds than even antimatter drives permit (since there is no requirement to have onboard propellant). They also double as handy point defense systems for dealing with both debris and ships that are attempting to turn themselves into relativistic kill missiles - remember that there is no such thing as an unarmed space ship, they are all potential weapons of mass destruction, especially once we reach the state where we have fusion drive powered ones.
And orbital infrastructure... Sounds impractical. Even if somehow possible, it'd be risky to have a dependency on such infrastructure. Fragile and susceptible to so many risks.
Remember that you do not need to move all of this mass off anywhere once in place so you build it like a building, not a ship that needs to be optimised for low mass and acceleration.
You do not build these flimsy since even the modest ones will have a big upfront cost and the better equipped one is, the bigger the payoff. They are incredibly easy to extend and maintain once the initial ring is set into place though since they are in orbit so as long as you match its own orbital plane, you can operate on it just fine.
You will have a big superstructure magnetically suspended around the moving ring rotating in the opposite direction to the inner ring at the speed of the earth's own rotation so it stays stationary relative to the ground, and which is both half the reason why we build these things but also makes it significantly difficult to penetrate that inner ring.
That superstructure is going to be much heavier than the inner ring by necessity since that inner ring is moving faster than orbital speeds to counteract the momentum generated by the superstructure. So you might as well use that mass for useful things.
We should also not think of active support structures as somehow less sturdy than passive ones. In fact they are far more sturdy since they can be used to create arbitrarily high levels of compressive strength - whatever level of juice you are willing to expend - and this is where those fusion reactors would indeed come in handy. You would also in reality use multiple inner rings instead of just one though one would be fine too for an initial construction.
Keep in mind though that even considering conventional power sources and no superconductors, these things can regenerate a decent fraction of that expended energy back by using the moving ferromagnetic matter inside to generate electricity through the induction generated by either orbiting along the earth or in the case of the atlas piller, falling all the way down from the mesosphere or even further if you decide that it's worth your investment to extend one all the way to geostationary ala the classic space elevator.
Might be a bit overkill though since the orbital ring itself can easily launch you at decent speeds for cislunar and even interplanetary travel.
You also probably have a shit tonne of solar panels on the superstructure itself and would probably want to add a fission or fusion reactor too for added redundancy since you always want multiple power sources for very large structures.
Either that or we continue to rely on rockets which cannot be scaled up to the point where off world travel is as common as air travel without bringing ecological ruin and gargantuan amounts of noise pollution. It's just about the only real curse of being on a planet that has both a thick atmosphere relative to most rocky planets (in our solar system) and also being the massive of the rocky planets.
>Using these resources to improve chemical flamethrowers is sub-optimal. A dead end.
Earth launch future is large rail gun (somewhere like Bolivia) as a first stage booster. Requires a bit of political will, international cooperation and a few billions. Unfortunately the 1st and 2nd aren't coming soon, so the "chemical flamethrowers" for now.
One can project from SpaceX's launch history that as the commercialization of space intensifies, this figure is going to continue to grow exponentially
Financially and ecologically this is not worse than manufacturing products in China and shipping them all over the world, or usual stuff like tourism, cloud computing etc.
I would argue that Starship is even more ecological than the other rockets, as it requires a cleaner fuel than Falcon (methane vs kerosene) and should be fully reusable (i.e. no tossing the rocket in the ocean and hoping it will sink).
If we manage to bootstrap space manufacturing, benefits for ecology, biology and material science are also self-evident.
And yet nothing in any response so far counters my claim that capital expenditure on space projects will likely increase exponentially. The only claim I made, and the one I was downvoted for.
> I would argue that Starship is even more ecological than the other rockets
Methalox combusts to CO2. As the burgeoning space industry scales up exponentially, so will the emissions.
https://everydayastronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Roc...
> If we manage to bootstrap space manufacturing, benefits for ecology, biology and material science are also self-evident.
Not 100% self-evident. Apart from how infeasible this is from the outset, once deployed at scale it would require transporting millions of tons of goods and raw materials back and forth against the gravity of the earth.
Not my domain, but I'm not sure there's a combustible fuel that could have the energy density to do this and not pollute the atmosphere (happy to be corrected on this). It seems we need to find a completely new means of propulsion (or offsetting with carbon capture) before we could have a green space industry.
Methane can be manufactured to be carbon neutral. The cost is prohibitive for everyday on the ground energy use but not so for rocket launches, since fuel is such a tiny portion of the cost of a flight.
Musk has mentioned the possibility of doing this.
Space elevators would be a cool solution, but they are in the realm of science fiction for now. So deploying at least some carbon capture solutions before space industry begins to scale actively is a good idea
I wasn't making an argument against companies making a lot of money. I was merely pointing out that the commercialization will be sinking capital investment far greater than just 2 billion, contrary to the poster's claim. I don't speak of the counterfactual, i.e., where that excess money would go otherwise, but I do share the OP's lament that we should be trying to fix problems on Earth. If Space tech can help in some way, I'm all for that.
> spending more on something that drives technological advancement is a good thing
Technologies are amoral. Whether or not the advancement or deployment of any particular technology is a 'good thing' is a matter of subjectivity.
First of all, just because the trend is exponential now doesn't mean it always will be. That's silly.
Second of all, the number of launches may be increasing at that rate because the launches have been made exponentially cheaper - why don't we look at % of GDP being put into space flight? I bet it would be flat or trending down.
Am I missing something here? I just don't think your implicit concerns are well-founded.
Well, I made no such argument, the GGP did, and I'll quote:
> Look at the numbers. SpaceX is doing it’s thing for a few billion a year. That’s chump change compared to the money being spent on, let’s say professional basketball.
... but I think if the poster wants to make the argument about relative costs they should at least make a fair assessment.
> First of all, just because the trend is exponential now doesn't mean it always will be. That's silly.
Silly why? Silly as the amount of processors that are sold every year?[0] How would a 'wealth creating' technology reaching economies of scale with a variety of use-cases not continue to grow? It is possible there's some sort of saturation point... but I can only see space industry as something that will spur it's own demand by creating industries that never existed before.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266973/global-semiconduc...
> Second of all, the number of launches may be increasing at that rate because the launches have been made exponentially cheaper - why don't we look at % of GDP being put into space flight? I bet it would be flat or trending down.
And I was wondering if someone would make this argument, because it is flawed. Even if costs do 'reduce exponentially' they are reducing towards a lower limit, not to zero. At some point the cost reductions per year will start to become insignificant, much in the same way that regular flight isn't becoming exponentially more economical every year. So after the low-hanging fruit has been tackled (e.g., rocket re-use, mass production), the number of launches will correlate pretty well with costs, especially now that a whole bunch of use cases now become profitable.
> Well, I made no such argument, the GGP did, and I'll quote:
You are talking in other posts about how no one is able to rebut you, but then when I try to restate your argument so I can rebut it, you refuse to engage and just say "I'm not making an argument." Help me out here, I'm trying to engage in good faith.
> > First of all, just because the trend is exponential now doesn't mean it always will be. That's silly.
> Silly why? Silly as the amount of processors that are sold every year?
Exponential growth never goes forever. Not in nature, not in economics, not in physics, not anywhere. It is limited by the available resources. You seem to be arguing that space flight will continue to grow exponentially, consuming all the resources required to sustain that growth, unless we stop it right now, or very soon. I think that is a silly argument.
You brought up processor sales as an example, but why not consider processor transistor density? That's something that was growing exponentially for a long time (Moore's law), but has since fallen off. We're putting lots of resources into processors, but only as much as it makes economic sense to do so. Why would space flight be any different?
> Even if costs do 'reduce exponentially' they are reducing towards a lower limit, not to zero.
Of course! But the argument isn't that the cost of space flight will somehow reach zero, the argument is that we aren't spending that much on space flight right now, we don't seem to be increasing our spending on it, and we're still getting benefits from cheaper launches, so why would we want to stop it?
> especially now that a whole bunch of use cases now become profitable
I think that looking at the profitability of use cases of space flight really only strengthens my argument, and weakens the one I think you're making.
The argument, nothing more, nothing less:
> One can project from SpaceX's launch history that as the commercialization of space intensifies, this figure is going to continue to grow exponentially
I have made further arguments, but this is the one that is downvoted. I imagine most of the people that downvoted were Elon stans, but what's funny is that I doubt Elon himself would disagree with this statement. He has made exactly this kind of superlinear growth with Tesla, his battery production, and I'm certain he has the same ambition for SpaceX.
> You seem to be arguing that space flight will continue to grow exponentially, consuming all the resources required to sustain that growth, unless we stop it right now, or very soon, unless we stop it right now, or very soon
Once again, I have never made this point. I am in sympathy with directing attention and capital to problems with earth, but I reserve that as my opinion and beyond this discussion.
Allow me to restate my claim so that we're both certain:
The estimate that capital expenditure for SpaceX's space projects is 2 billion per year is short-sighted, and maybe a little disingenuous, given that that figure will grow exponentially in the longer term.
It's this exponential growth we're arguing about, whether it will be 'eventually drawing from other, more worthy projects' is a morality question I did not pose. Agreed?
> It is limited by the available resources
Err, yes. I'm not saying growth goes forever, obviously, but by the time the space industry (on earth) saturates, spending on space will be many orders of magnitude more. Let alone that acquisition of raw materials and manufacturing for space can continue off earth, so I don't think depletion of resources are a problem in the very long term.
> but why not consider processor transistor density?
Because it's completely orthogonal to my point. I'm not talking about efficiencies, I'm talking about gross spending on the technology. Full stop.
> we don't seem to be increasing our spending on it
But we will be increasing this spending year-on-year, likely at an exponential rate. You disagree with this, but it seems we're both speculating. Though for at least my speculation, the current trend, and history, broadly agrees.
> I think that looking at the profitability of use cases of space flight really only strengthens my argument, and weakens the one I think you're making.
The one I wasn't making. But I'm not sure about the argument you're making? If SpaceX is making exponentially more profit, capital expenditure on commercial space ventures must be increasing. If there's more profit, it's because someone, somewhere, is fronting up the cash.
Could this money be better allocated in order to solve Earth's problems? Probably. Might space tech in some way help Earth anyway? Maybe. But will the spending for a new frontier of wealth increase exponentially in the medium to long term? Barring some major catastrophe or extinction event, it's inevitable.
Meanwhile we have more oil and gas reserves now than ever. We're not running out of anything, not really. But the malthusians want to reduce population by 16x. They really do. It's crazy.
Now, to answer your question... Substitute any topic into "how is it that so many educated, intelligent people seem to think that we...". The answer is pretty simple: we each don't know everything, in fact we know very little (and about many many things nothing really), and we are very (extremely!) susceptible to peer pressure, and we like to go with the flow, and we accept authority blindly where we know little, and so on.
It's a real problem. We just don't teach people how to think about what they know little about. Epistemology is hard enough, but we need people to do more than reason about what they know and how they know it and what they might not know and all that. We need people to have an idea of how to think about the stuff they know little about that they don't even want to know about -- stuff that -no matter how little they care for the details of- is super topical and where getting the answers collectively wrong could be disastrous.
This seems pretty extreme, but thank you for bringing the concept of Malthusianism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism ) to my attention. While i'm not convinced that it's likely to be the end of humanity (but rather the results of thousands of compounding factors), the irresponsibility in regards to unrestrained consumerism is something that i see every day, and there is certainly some merit to those arguments in my eyes because of this.
> The answer is pretty simple: we each don't know everything, in fact we know very little (and about many many things nothing really), and we are very (extremely!) susceptible to peer pressure, and we like to go with the flow, and we accept authority blindly where we know little, and so on.
This, however, i'm not entirely sure about. Short of militant disregard for climate change or even the idea that human actions are capable of changing it in the first place, the viewpoints that i've personally seen expressed are more in the direction of feeling powerless and somewhat depressed about the state of things. Instead of outright ignorance, most of the people that i've talked with believe that the governments have largely failed them and the mechanisms of representation that should be in place are only so as far as looks are concerned. For example, lobbying and corporate interests are prioritized, as well as industry development is prioritized over sustainability. In the end, it feels like maximizing profit margins takes precedence over sustainable progress and long term advancement.
Edit: Climate change and all that is just one example, but the fact that many feel powerless even if they aware of what's going on stands for other things as well.
And most of those people that i've talked with have felt like there's little to nothing that they can individually do, seeing as a significant portion of the society is more than happy to live a hedonistic lifestyle that's rooted in consumption. That doesn't mean that we need to live in some dystopian nightmare either, but i'd argue that it's definitely a worthy goal to make the environment thrive first and to focus on a more utilitarian way of life - meat dishes as something to enjoy rather than to have with every meal, a new phone every 5 years instead of every single year, energy efficient hardware (like Athlon 200GEs) for homelabs instead of the latest Threadripper CPUs (unless absolutely necessary), a used but dependable car instead of a new one and so on. And, of course, supporting local and small businesses, as well as trying your own hand at some of that stuff - going out to hunt game, drag it back home, skin it and cook it (if nothing else, that really makes you appreciate the meat you're eating), or even just simpler things like growing your own tomatoes and cucumbers (which are absolutely delicious), where possible.
If everyone lived at least a bit more like that, we'd have even more breathing room in regards to the environment, in regards to resource usage etc., which feels like a good thing no matter how you look at it. Of course, that's probably also unrealistic as far as expectations go.
The reason is that it's thought from a perspective of the global north, that assumes we just need to restrict a little to achieve a lot. That is not going to solve the global climate crisis.
The simple reason is that there are 7 billion people who are not living in the rich countries. These people have the right to access resources as much as the people born in rich countries.
Consuming 20% less carbon in the west will not offset the increased consumption in the rest of the world.
Every gallon of oil that can be produced at a reasonable price will be consumed. If Europe and the US switched to all electric cars tomorrow, the rest of the world would still consume the oil, especially at a lower price than now (because the US and Europe are no longer conusming it).
There are things we could do right now, without significant impact to our lifestyle. I just learned, that over 3% of climate emissions are crop burning. 2% is deforestation. We could literally stop this with the signing of a bill. The US and the EU agree to tax imports from crop burning countries at a high rate. It will drive up prices of Brazilian beef and Indonesian palm oil a little, but of little impact to the consumer.
Cement is another 3%, which could be solved with CO2 neutral cement. Electric trucks will be a game changer once they are cheaper to run than Gas trucks. And yes nuclear is something we can't stop developing.
When I argue for a tech forward approach than not because I'm a tech bro that believes science solves all problems, but because I strongly believe reductions are not gonna work. If we rely on consumption reductions we are truly screwed.
That may be, but Occam's razor suggests that it would be a good idea to ask why that still hasn't been done. Surely there are some reason why such obvious and useful things still haven't been implemented, right? I may be wrong, but i'd like to suggest that there are certain interest groups behind all of that, for whom such changes would be bad for business.
Also, what makes you think that both approaches couldn't be utilized? Use less resources, increase taxes to compensate the drop in prices that would otherwise follow and gradually stop subsidizing things like meat production, at least to the degree where the price at stores is artificially lowered. At the same time, attempt to subsidize wind, sun, geothermal, nuclear and other forms of getting electricity and see whether things are better or worse in 50 years.
Those approaches are not mutually exclusive, as long as you have plenty of legislative bodies on your side. Sadly, we don't and probably won't, at least until a generational shift takes place. As Planck's principle states: "Science progresses one funeral at a time", which could be attributed to social policies to some degree as well.
Of course, in regards to electric vehicles, one also has to consider the necessary infrastructure to support them and what's the CO2 cost of creating their batteries in the first place. For a while, and certainly in some geographical settings, hybrid vehicles could also be good for a gradual transition.
Clearly there are, we want cheaper Brazilian beef, Indonesian palm oil, Cambodian agricultural products. But let's say we tax imports from countries that don't clamp down on crop burning, I doubt the average consumer would feel any difference. The last flood in Germany is estimated to cost 10 billion Euro. Overall the benefit would outweigh the cost.
>Also, what makes you think that both approaches couldn't be utilized? Use less resources, increase taxes to compensate the drop in prices that would otherwise follow and gradually stop subsidizing things like meat production, at least to the degree where the price at stores is artificially lowered. At the same time, attempt to subsidize wind, sun, geothermal, nuclear and other forms of getting electricity and see whether things are better or worse in 50 years.
I think using less resources can certainly help but to a degree that it almost doesn't matter. Especially if it's just about irrelevant stand-ins. For example the EU will forbid the sale of fossil fuel motorbikes in 2035. This is about something that has an effect on 0.1% of the carbon emission of a single economic area. And with motorcycles the benefits are way way less than cars as they are driven a lot less than cars and the increased CO2 of production takes years to result in CO2 reductions of the lifetime. So a whole industry is forced to build new factories develop new models for the smallest of the small reductions, while the big stuff is left on the table. Or SUV's. SUV owners are demonized, while millions of tons of CO2 are emitted shipping Chinese made goods around the globe.
> Those approaches are not mutually exclusive, as long as you have plenty of legislative bodies on your side. Sadly, we don't and probably won't, at least until a generational shift takes place. As Planck's principle states: "Science progresses one funeral at a time", which could be attributed to social policies to some degree as well.
Agreed and this is what I want to achieve. A science driven approach not one of pandering to envy and the industry groups.
> This seems pretty extreme
Well, yes, that's because it is. But some really do want that. See The Georgia Guidestones for more information.
Even a European level of resource usage (roughly half that of US, last I checked) would be hard to achieve for the entire world pop.
A good example is river health. We can provide more meat with high density grazing. But the waste products have to go somewhere, so the farmers spread them across their fields. Now when it rains, these run into the rivers and we get algae bloom. Majority of rivers in UK are now dying, for example.
Have we discovered a sustainable way of producing more meat in less space? I hope so. But perhaps we are destroying natural systems whose benefit to us has not been properly quantified, in a way that will be extremely difficult to reverse.
Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years?
I keep pointing to the fact that negative population growth is already baked in to the world's population pyramid, and responders conveniently continue to ignore that fact.
We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates.
> But environmental destruction is way up.
> A good example is river health.
Demonstrably false in the U.S. In the U.S. in the 30s river fires were so common that they weren't notable. By 1947 they were so rare that a river fire graced the cover of Time magazine to get people outraged (and succeeded, and good thing too because that was part of a process that led Americans to care about their environment). U.S. rivers are much cleaner than they used to be. Sure, there are some terrible stories still (e.g., the Hudson river has some terrible pollutants now-thankfully-mostly-buried under sediment).
I don't know what's the case in the UK, but I would be surprised if the state of the UK's rivers today was worse than 50 years ago, and shocked to my core if it was worse than 100 years ago.
If the population size goes down but consumption per person goes up by an equivalent amount (easy to imagine when US citizen emits 5x carbon of average citizen of many other countries) we have the same problem.
If things are so rosy environmentally, why are so many species going extinct due to habitat loss?
If population has gone up, so food needs have gone up, and total land under agriculture has gone down, and the planet has greened... that means that farming efficiency has increased by so more than enough to feed the planet's people that it's not profitable to keep so much land under agriculture, and most of the land that is no longer under agriculture didn't get paved over -- it's forest now.
As long as the population increases, Malthus is right. There is going to be some ultimate carrying capacity at some point. Ultimate amount of energy we can harness. It's just a question when. Certainly before our energy consumption is enough to literally boil the oceans.
Plug in different growth rates and the answer could range from tens of years to hundreds of millions of years!
Its not actually practically relevant and every-time people used it as an argument it has been proven in terms of practical impact.
Wrong. As long as population growth remains positive without end in sight, Malthus right.
However, THE END OF POSITIVE POPULATION GROWTH IS IN SIGHT.
I mean, I said so in the comment you responded to, and you conveniently ignored it. Instead you went right for the Malthusian fearmongering talking points. "It's just a question of when" -- no, no it's not, not if population plateaus and then shrinks (negative population growth for a while is practically baked in now into the world's demographics).
> Plug in different growth rates and the answer could range from tens of years to hundreds of millions of years!
Why thank you. Hundreds of millions of years is more than there is time for life on this planet. Without our help, each successive glacial period was ending with CO2 lower than the end of the previous glacial period, and plants starve below certain levels (I think it's 150ppm for one kind of photosynthesis, lower for another) and was going to end up below those levels soon enough. Now, thanks to HUMANS life on Earth has millions more years in it because we've put a little bit of the Earth's sequestered carbon back into the carbon cycle.
Climate change also exists. So do resource limits.
Something that doesn't exist is the science of living outside of an existing planetary ecosystem.
Do some research on how much is understood about creating a stable ecosystem out of sand, metal ore, and water. You'll find it's a good approximation to zero.
Flag wavers think it's all about building giant rockets, planting a flag - and boom. Colony! Asteroid mining! Etc!
The reality couldn't be more different. Giant rockets are barely the loading screen. Feeding humans, dealing with waste products without choking on them, growing or synthesising essential nutrients, building systems that do all of this in a stable self-sustaining way - these are all beyond hard.
And that's not even getting into psychology and politics.
So until that changes, running your own planet - the one you got for free, and which was working fine already - as if you're trying to test it to destruction to find out just how stable it really is, is an unbelievably dumb thing to do.
Nobody actually interested in space believes this.
> So until that changes
It wont change unless you try to change it.
I seem to remember some guy saying something about that.
We’ve never let the fact that something doesn’t exist yet stop us. We are a species of inventors. We didn’t stay huddled naked in caves because they work and we got them for free. We aren’t meant to be like the rest of the ecosystem that mutely accepts its fate. We know we can die but we also reject the natural order of succumbing to predation, famine, disease and exposure. This planet is a cradle that we cannot lie in forever. Some day it will be dust and we will have to learn to walk amongst the stars.
Indeed, when we lived in caves, there were only so many of them. We totally blew past the cave sustainability model thousands of years ago.
I'm not saying we should be cavalier about pushing current limits, but I also wouldn't be cavalier about doing things to hurt today's humans due to fears that are not well founded (because, again, negative population growth is now baked in to the world population pyramid, so that soon we won't be pushing the planet's limits any longer).
What constitutes as 'pushing limits' depends on the kind of planet that is considered tolerable. For many conservation-minded people, pushing the limits happened well before 7 billion.
A population shrinking to a quarter of it's size is only considered undesirable to some because the economy doesn't factor in the externalities of having a large population - e.g., climate change, reduced access to nature, increased stress, polluted environment, species loss, food chain collapse. The solution is to no longer permit these to be externalities, and I don't see that happening without government intervention on a global scale.
As for anyone concerned about an ageing population, within the next few decades human labor shortages will be solved with automation - to the point that there will be a shrinking job market. As for caring for the elderly, they will have access to new mobility technology, and life extension - at first expensive, but then trickling down to poorer people before 2 generations.
Note that unstated in the quoted text is a strong assumption or implication that we are "trying to test [the planet] to destruction ..." with our 8bn people. It's hard escape a soupçon that when someone says or implies that, they really resent most of that 8bn people, maybe to the point where they'd be ecstatic if they got wiped out. I'm not saying you do, but it's a pretty gross feeling I get when I see that line of argument.
And look, if fertility rates for the whole world were 8 and trending upwards with the current 8bn, then I think I would be panicking myself, and agreeing with you, and predicting ecological disaster, terrible wars, etc. But we're not.
Almost throughout the entire world, fertility rates have crashed below replacement rate. Some cases are fairly surprising, like Iran's, which had a fertility rate of 8 in 1978 and has been below replacement rate for a number of years.
The reasons for fertility rates spiking in the 20th century and then dropping so far so fast are very, very well understood. It even used to be fashionable to talk about that around here, but not now -- now the Malthusian narrative seems to be in full swing without regard to the actual facts of global population pyramid (why??):
- enormous technological and medical advances lowered child mortality rates and increased life expectancy very quickly in the 20th century
- but it took time for the number of children people had in suddenly wealthy countries to drop to match the new reality
- political changes (and possibly pushing even remotely close to the planet's carrying capacity) have caused economic pressures that have driven young people to reduce their fertility, postpone family formation, or forgo family formation altogether
- those add up to us now being about to enter a negative population growth regime
For an example of political changes that have caused such pressures see Social Security and programs like it around the world. Because those programs make caring for the current generation of retirees the burden of the current generations of workers, that puts a not-neglible economic pressure on the working generations, and as fertility rates drop, that pressure increases -- a vicious (or perhaps virtuous, if you like) cycle.
Trees—like Dominican mahogany grow really slowly and now there are so few of them we have basically run out. I can name several other examples—most notably Guayacan.
There is a bunch of scarcity and destruction. I’m pretty sure we can fix them—but for the trees and the animals it’s unlikely that I get to experience them as was so in previous lifetimes.
It’s a shame we couldn’t manage them sustainably previously.
The environment is cleanest and best in richer countries because rich people can afford to care about it. That's right, poor people who worry about where their next meal is going to come from could not care less about the environment.
So if you want the 8bn people of this planet to care for it, we have to make them richer than they are.
I'm still surprised they moved to this orbital fly so quickly without doing more tests. Going from 3 engines to almost 30 is crazy. Also, If I understand it right, both booster and starship will end up in the ocean. I hope they will be able to reuse at least a few engines.
In the chamber, the hot gases are >3500K, and touching the inner walls with a melting point at ~1400K, yet the walls don't melt, because they are cooled with more power than they are heated.
I'd argue that they're being cooled with equal power, otherwise they could freeze infinitely which is physically impossible.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasa-will-pay-a-stag...
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=merlin+engine+dry+mass
[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28630+kg+of+gold+in+U...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28%28630+kg+*+%28d...
Current spot price of gold is $1800/oz. Merlin dry weight is 1380 pounds. 1380 pounds of gold is right at 40 million dollars.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Shuttle_program :
"A total of 46 reusable RS-25 engines, each costing around US$40 million, were flown during the Space Shuttle program"
Beautiful.
A whole industry bootstrapping itself to make semi-conductors doubling every 18 months, going from exotic, mission critical hardware to commodity; SpaceX is doing the same thing with flight hardware. Contrast that with previous generation engines (the RS-25 comes to mind) with a sticker price of 125 millions... per engine! [0]
[0] https://spacenews.com/aerojet-rocketdyne-defends-sls-engine-...
The USA brings in 50 million or so people from other countries. Often they are bloody minded, stone cold, hard workers that will sacrifice everything to give their children the opportunity to be Americans. These people are some of the best in the world in my opinion.
The US dollar being used as a reserve currency for most of the world means that it is the center of international investment. This means that the billions of dollars that flowed into PayPal and Elon Musk's startups probably came in large part from foreign investment funds.
Our universities crank out some of the weirdest and least conventional engineers you can imagine. Most of them are half-crazy in the first place. The archetype of Mad Scientist can be found in physics departments and engineering labs all over the country. Conformity is often seen as a kind of perversity. We idolize professors like Feynman and read novels like Ignition! This is why you see bridges collapsing and power grids failing while we build some of the most advanced technology in the world. We hate boring maintenance and love to launches cars into space.
Finally in no small part is American sub-culture. Specifically the science fantasy of space travel and colonization that is in the heart of a lot of American engineers and scientists. The same fantasy that captured the heart of Elon Musk, a billionaire South African immigrant who made his fortune in Silicon Valley. In addition there is the added fact that few other countries would allow some random small company to build ICBMs in their metaphorical backyard. The USA is kinda loose like that...
Over the last 40 years I've known and worked with some of these people, and I marvel at their tenacity and the sheer force of will they have to succeed. It just blows me away. Sadly, it seems to disappear from the next generation. I'll admit that I have a small sample size.
These people are actively undermining the American spirit - I am saying this as an immigrant to USA and a person of color. I am fine with understanding racism in USA, it is completely unacceptable to inject this into STEM education. The next generation is going to grow up learning more about race at the expense of learning mathematics.
This isn't just my opinion - professors from UC Berkeley/Stanford and many major universities have written an open letter to the California Governor: https://www.independent.org/news/news_detail.asp?newsid=2287
Apparently, the message was clear and the California government is pausing this initiative: https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/ag/ag/yr21/agenda202107.asp
This disgusts me. Some kids are stupid (Apologies for blunt language, but it's true, life is unfair.) or have poor home lives, so let's remove education that can help them have better lives because some of the struggling kids are black. Counterintuitive, oversensitive, and directly hindering
Dragging everyone down because some diversity quotas aren't met is awful. Unless there's clear evidence that teaching advanced math directly contributes to racism, teach it, make it harder. Make our kids work and succeed and fail again.
What about the black overachievers? Princeton certainly didn't lower the bar for him [0]
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/10/us/princeton-first-black-vale...
I'm not even saying that black kids have any inherent disadvantages, but that people have become so sensitive to that perception as to seriously hinder actual education.
Seriously, people are worried about racial sensitivity in math. These two things do not go together, should not go together, and have almost zero reason to interact.
Instead of paying for a committee of bureaucrats (with generous pensions!) to write about "racism in math", why not hire a couple of undergrads as extra tutors for students of color struggling with math?
The big problem to me is that teaching math is hard, and teaching math well, as recommended in that booklet, is really hard. You can write all the pamphlets you want, but in the end the answer will be about the same - get really good teachers. Which probably means paying teachers a lot more than we do now.
It is strange that you think that letter would change my opinion though. It doesn't really contain any analysis or arguments. It just says that the changes are bad, and here is a long list of people that agree. After having read the actual document, why would you think reading that letter would change my mind?
Originally, you linked to a pamphlet and implied that the authors of the pamphlet were "actively undermining the American spirit". I pointed out that the packet appeared to provide good advice for math instruction. You responded "perhaps you should question your stance based on what apparently is a marketing pamphlet precisely designed to persuade people". Why did you link to it then?
What information are you pointing me to that would "convince [me] otherwise"? I read the letter you linked to, and it provides no arguments. As I said previously, it is mostly a list of names of people who are publicly stating their disagreement with a different document - literally appeal to authority fallacy.
I think you would be surprised how much we are aligned on the importance of math education. I'm an engineer from a family of engineers. I clicked your link because I have a son starting kindergarten in a California public school in two and a half weeks. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that the math education being advocated appeared better than the one I received, not worse.
It's important to show what the marketing material is - verbatim - and what kind of BS is being peddled by these people. Apparently, you didn't find it BS so I asked you to read up on it.
I am not following your logic in this entire argument chain. Let's move on.
Overcorrection is the norm.
Probably because incrementalism simply isn't possible. So when reform does happen, it releases decades of bottled up pressure. Like a dam bursting.
I don't have a dog in this fight. I've seen too many of these spasms to care too much.
That said, my hot take on bias training is two fold.
1) Bias training for teachers (and every other profession) is long overdue. This is indisputable.
2) I'm unaware of any validation which shows bias training for students is worthwhile. Maybe it is. But hippocratic oath dictates that we figure this out before committing.
Teachers et al should dog food their own training for a while. Lead by example. See how well it works.
My hunch is that students will pick up most of the important lessons thru osmosis.
Simply removing teacher-born biases, those negative role models, certainly couldn't hurt.
I don't know what component is responsible for the difference between immigrants and natives. Maybe it's the selection, the change of environment, the adversity, or sheer diversity of individuals. If we could manage to build an education system that produced students as dedicated, creative and hard working as our best immigrants, the USA would secure a place in history that would make the 1400 years of the Roman Empire seem like a blip in comparison.
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
But have access to fewer resources, networks, capital, markets etc..
Also, the % of US immigrants that are on the 'high end' is relatively smaller.
Migration to the US, when you include off the books migration, is a little bit towards the low skilled end.
But definitely the smaller relative portion of 'hardcore talent' is still actually quite large in real terms, and yes, they do disproportionately contribute. It frankly doesn't take a large quantity.
I think this mostly populist myth.
It's definitely possible for people to do 'great things' but there are innumerable factors beyond that. 'Passion' I would say is not even an important or necessary element.
'Grit' is probably necessary, but not nearly sufficient either.
That anything is possible, doesn't mean that it's remotely likely to happen even with unlimited 'passion and grit', or even talent.
So their bankers and politicians just can't compete.
For instance, look at Russia! Their engineers are probably twice as crazy as Americans, but they have very little room to do crazy things with that talent. They don't have trillions of US dollars being sheltered in their tech startups by VC funds.
One related anecdote. I read somewhere a while ago about how Apple had a lot of internal security, even between teams. They said the reason for that is that if someone in the iPod department found out about the iPhone they'd realize the threat to their career and work to undermine it.
[1] https://www.inverse.com/article/34976-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-t...
In Canada we lock out all foreign investment in lots of areas.
Perhaps the government doesn't like foreigns tapping Canadians' communications? The NSA listens in on its own citizens with the coöperation of the US telcos, so what chance would foreigners have?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
As a Canadian I would certainly like more competition, but I can certainly see the reasoning.
As if foreign countries needed to actually own the infrastructure to tap it [0]. All they need is to have employees inside with double allegiances [1] [2] [3]
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-now-...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china...
[2] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-ivison-csis-right-to-w...
[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-raytheon-engineer-sent...
Canada's position on foreign ownership and trade is fairly consistent with norms in advanced countries, and fairly liberal, probably more so than most nations.
Non-market forces also play a huge role in this, for example, irrespective of what the auto-trade policies actually are between the US and Japan ... the Japanese would simply never allow US firms to compete on equal terms there.
Cultural factors, some more systematic and institutionalized than others, provide enough impetus that they represent at least as much of an issue as anything agreed upon formally by trade representatives.
Never understood putting barriers and quota on entertainment (as well as government subsidies). Companies like Disney and Marvel both made billions simply by making content people want to watch. Canada is pretty much free to export its content anywhere and sell it. Why not simply compete?
There are two fundamental reasons that content everywhere is subsidized and protected. They are of course related.
First, more obviously is the cultural aspect. The things we believe, the stories we tell, are part of our identities. With critical mass and investment those stories some will take root.
It's a little bit of a myth to suggest that a small creative team just 'makes something' and it goes big. This does happen, but generally speaking, it takes a machine. Many layers. 'Taylor Swift' should be thought of as a 'Brand and Production Company' - as opposed to a person.
You'll find that almost all truly creative endeavours are at least partly communitarian. The ballet exists only because Louis XIV, the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere, personally created it.
Almost all such endeavours have a purely creative component, it's actually more rare than not that those works are purely commercial. The creative world is in constant tension between 'art and money'. You often hear famous movie stars say 'One for Me, One for the Studio' hinting at that.
Some cultures are stronger than others (aka European), and some have more of a critical mass in terms of audience (aka Indonesia), some have both (aka Japan). Some have contiguous histories of relative sovereignty (aka Thailand), some the opposite (aka Laos, Tibet) and so varying levels of support and protection are needed otherwise a lot of it would just evaporate.
Most countries provide fairly significant tax advantages etc. for creative works.
Second, is the fact that creative works on the commercial side, like anything, are an industry with similar kinds of underlying components and critical masses.
In that context it's a little bit glib to say to a group of people in a little region for example to 'compete' with a massive established industrial base. Whatever the industry.
Hollywood is big enough, has several very institutionalized layers of production, incredible degree of hyper-specialization (i.e. you will find more 'kinds of trades' and people who are really good at it there, than anywhere in that field). That includes access to capital, legal frameworks, specialized talent, workers guild specialization, harmonization with government (i.e. getting locations), talent agencies, distribution channels and relationships with Netflix etc..
This extends to the rest of the 'support' aspects of the industry like bookings on talk shows, morning shows, cover placements in magazines, media dockets etc.. It's all professionalized and mostly corporate.
Marvel films, in particular are a really good example of this - they are not particularly good films, but the production quality of them is basically '1st rate' at every turn, from writing, production design, direction, story narrative, the immense production support, post-production / effects, marketing.
Once you add in language and cultural barriers, i.e. the fact that a movie about 'Captain America' will have a strong enough audience domestically, with some acceptance abroad, and you have insurmountable competitive advantage. (Nobody is going to watch a film about 'Captain France', or 'Captain Japan' - or rather, many fewer).
The only other place that can compete really is the UK, which has many of those same foundational advantages, plus a long history of 'popular theatre' and especially the BBC which exists in part as a systematic support / lynch-pin under the auspices relevant to Point #1.
Canada, pound for pound, actually punches above it's weight relative to the US in a lot of production aspects. The new Dune film is Denis Villneuve, and his 'posse' of creatives are from Montreal. In some ways, it's a 'Canadian-led' film, but that just happens to be talent, it's not really part of the industrial base. Villneuve exists because Quebec strongly supports creative endeavours (and FYI for every Villneuve, there are 10 you've not heard of, 50 who never really had support or a shot, and 1000 who tried and failed).
FYI there is actually a lot of film production in Toronto/Van/Montreal, but mostly the 'labour' bits of production, not the choice roles.
The raw economics of entertainment, in the short run, optimize like anything else. Take a 'Large Open Economy' and put it next to 'Small Open Economies' and you'll see consolidation hugely disproportionately in the 'Large' economy, which is where all the talent, surplus, and good jobs end up.
Entertainment happens to be at least one sector, where due to 'Point #1' (i.e. culture), there's wide recognition of the need to support it via non-market forces, so at least there's that. But really the same applies to any sector.
If we really think that we should just all enjoy Marvel and Netflix - and that's that - well then all of that is fine - but it's such a hugely narrow aspect of creative output.
Finally, the true globalization of the industry has seen the biggest budgets move towards ever dumber films. Fast and Furious, Transformers ... they have to appeal not not just to 'working class Americans', but to 'the global working class' which is barely literate, and of course they're from diverse cultures so there's a lot less to draw upon for cultural reference. 'Transformers' , 'Godzilla' etc. are basically giant action sequences and that's it. Of course that's totally fine - but they suck up the budget and attention of other potential works, which don't get made. So ironically, this problem has manifested itself even for the 'Large Open Economy'.
For your reference, here are quotes from a few dozen industry luminaries on that subject [1]. It's a good read.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/20/movies/movie-...
That explains why Parasite and Money Heist flopped.
> The new Dune film is Denis Villneuve, and his 'posse' of creatives are from Montreal. In some ways, it's a 'Canadian-led' film, but that just happens to be talent, it's not really part of the industrial base. Villneuve exists because Quebec strongly supports creative endeavours (and FYI for every Villneuve, there are 10 you've not heard of, 50 who never really had support or a shot, and 1000 who tried and failed).
From what I've been told, Quebec is the only place in Canada that consumes its own culture.
It explains why thousands of films, just like 'Parasite' and 'Money Heist' flop, why they are not on Netflix or in theatres, and why you've never heard of them, and why neither Spain nor S. Korea are entertainment powerhouses in film.
KPop however, which is definitely a Korean export, has some strong 'industrial foundations' along the lines of what I'm talking about. It's a real industry there.
Here are 2021 'Canadian Films' - have a gander and see how many you recognize. [1]
Quebec consumes it's own content because they are a distinct from the rest of North America, and they invest a lot in culture. And a pretty good comparative basis for Ontario / Rest of Canada.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_films_of_2021
That's true in America as well. There's only so many good movies!
> Quebec consumes it's own content because they are a distinct from the rest of North America, and they invest a lot in culture.
And they buy it, they don't need a government check to make it.
you mean a utility, right?
Once a location is served by more than one provider, it becomes a commodity (who can sell packets the cheapest).
There’s multiple ways to deliver ip packets to a property in the country.
A better solution could be to have ducts to run whatever owned by the council and available on a RAND basis - sane way roads are, but it’s not essential for competition.
> but didn't seem to have any problem with Airbus taking over the CSeries program for almost nothing.
This is actually a somewhat amusing to bring up in this context, because US protectionism is what made that happen.
Boeing tried to kill off the C-Series by getting the US administration to impose 300% (sic!) import duties because ... it threatened US jobs. Airbus was targeting the program aggressively as well with tactics like price matching, so the CSeries was already struggling before that.
Bombardies only viable way out was to join a partnership with Airbus (which got 50.1%), so the planes could be manufactured in their Alabama plant and it could be positioned within the Airbus product range instead of competing.
The partnership was forced move, and quite a big middle finger to Boeing. The alternative would have probably been just shutting it down.
Could you imagine the French letting Dassault, Airbus or the US government letting Boeing fail?
Also, Telecoms, Banking and Communications are protected industries in every country, Canada is not special there.
If Canadian Telecoms Bell, Rogers and Telus went up for grabs, and even if Canada realistically had the same access to US markets - do you think Telus would be buying AT&T? Or the other way around?
It doesn't matter 'how well run' Canadian telecoms are (I don't think they are, but even if they were) - or how poorly US firms were run. The 'big' would eat the 'little'.
All of the 'good jobs' in Telecom like network planning, research, anything related to R&D, executive management - would go to the US. Canada would be left with 'Customer Service' and some local marketing.
There wouldn't really be that much gain for anyone, the net 'savings' would be marginal, and then, you'd be left with the Canadian government trying to regulate giant behemoths the size of entire sectors of the Canadian economy without much leverage.
That sector is verticalized with Entertainment and so with Bell, would go a whole bunch of TV / Cable stations etc.
Then AT&T/NBC would even more effectively be able to push their own programming, guests (who promote films, books, sports) and further push down anything remotely local towards hegemonic products.
So aside from the not-so-obvious economic advantages, there are quite a few externalities to worry about as well.
America in particular likes to push the concept of 'Free Markets' - because it has tremendous advantage in that context.
'Just Open Your Economy!' is the strategy of a 'Giant Economy' telling 'Little Economies' that 'We Will Devour Everything Of Value'. It's essentially a form of economic colonialism.
Adam Smith isn't exactly wrong, there can be many benfits to both sides, Canada has this kind of 'Gilded Cage' situation wherein it can maintain a very high standard of living by being next to the US, but it comes at the cost of losing the ability to do almost anything exceptional that in any way competes with the US.
The EU is not as unbalanced and they have different national constituents, with longer history and more potent foundational industries. Tiny Sweden makes Jet Fighters (!) which comes out of their cold war Air Force history of independence and a formerly relatively giant Air Force.
That America can have guys like 'Elon Musk' + Space X is a function of a few things, but at very least, it's scale.
The US is a huge market and only certain things can only be done at that scale. Most small countries do not have competitive automakers. Space X is essentially dependent on US Government contracts, at least indirectly.
Second, it's 'much bigger than it's peripherals'. This means that the US sucks all the talent and capital from neighbouring states into it's systems.
Think of the 'Silicon Valley' as not an 'American' place - think of it as an 'International Zone' that happens to be in the US. A 'super cluster' with a giant critical mass of talent.
Right now, arguably due at least partly to the inherent advantage that the Euro gives to Germany - Spaniards, French, Italians etc. are moving to Germany at considerably greater rates than in the other direction. That's where the industrial base will grow jobs from. Peripheral European states that don't manage to found their own competitive sectors will turn into places like Alabama and Louisiana where the talent vacates before it can establish into critical mass.
Third, another major artifact is inequality. Low-end jobs in American don't pay well, and they don't get benefits. The surpluses to the high side of the pyramid are huge. But when you take into consideration the 'off the books' economy, it's massive. California has almost 3 Million undocumented citizens, who are more likely to be young, more likely to be workforce participants, almost entirely working at the lowest end of the labour pool, and definitely earning far sub-minimum wage. Every manual activity from planting, to picking, to trucking, to food preparation and cleaning - everything but the 'front facing stuff' is often fulfilled by people 'off the books' and the consumer and corporate surpluses from that are gigantic. Add to that the downward pressure on wages ... and basically you have a giant wealth transfer machine with enormous surpluses floating into the hands of those with middle to upper class incomes.
Just consider what all of the US stats would look like if we accounted for those jobs, at those wages. What would GDP/capita start to look like, GINI coefficient, other measures of inequality and % 'uninsured', voting rights.
I'm not making a political comment here, it's a problem and a paradox, but pointing out the material advantages to the non-serfdom population.
This excess free cash-flow both on an individual level and corporate level enable so many things to happen, it's hard to fathom. It's so common in America for individuals to have hobbies i.e. drones, cars, travel, tech etc. that are 'really expensive', beyond the reproach of the middle class in other nations.
Relatively cheap energy, wide open spaces and relatively cheap land, especially compared to Europe for example, again, this has all sorts of 'unseen surpluses'.
So those are just a few of the differentiators and of course, there are so many more, it's complicated.
... So they do block international investment. Therefore, the comment is correct.
> Second, it's 'much bigger than it's peripherals'. This means that the US sucks all the talent and capital from neighbouring states into it's systems.
Choosing innovation has the side effect of attracting talent. Other countries can simply compete on perks to retain their talent! I recall Musk, in an interview, saying that he felt going to Stanford was a better use of his time than military service for the (then apartheid) regime.
> Think of the 'Silicon Valley' as not an 'American' place - think of it as an 'International Zone' that happens to be in the US. A 'super cluster' with a giant critical mass of talent.
And yet it's very much in America. And every time you are hearing "the Silicon Valley of X" it's someone trying to sell you something...
Like every other aerospace company
> It never achieved its sales goals.
Looks like they have years of backlog. And the whole program is profitable. They landed Delta as their North American launch customer.
> Moreover the money that they dumped into it was ruled illegal by the WTO
Wasn't it overturned?
In other words the most critical quality is permission-free innovation.
In all other systems from feudalism to socialism to communism there generally is just one department or agency responsible for each thing, and it's usually either the state itself or some state-blessed entity with an enforced monopoly. If that entity does it's job well, that's great. If it doesn't, tough shit. Nobody can go around it.
This is also why I disagree with market purists about anti-trust. If a private company gets so huge that it is able to occupy an entire market niche for a prolonged period of time, it's important to do something to either break it up or incentivize other entrants. A private company allowed to remain super-dominant in one sector for too long starts to look and behave like a Soviet bureau.
I would say that if a private company gets so huge and can control an entire market niche for a prolonged period of time, they will inevitably stagnate which leaves them open to competition. The biggest problem issue for such private companies is not that they can control entire market segments but that they can lobby the government for regulations that permanently entrench themselves by making competition illegal in some way. The regulations are almost always done in the name of safety (if we don't regulate this then new unsafe entrants who don't follow all our internal practices could enter the industry and kill people). So they get government regulations created that exactly follow the company's own internal regulations. That both accelerates the company toward stagnation (they can no longer update the regulations) and also puts up walls for new competition as the new entrants can't innovate if they have to follow all the legacy processes.
That further gets trade unions/teamsters involved who learned to follow those regulations in trades schools and further act to restrict any improvement as it would kill their jobs.
Them being a monopoly in and of itself is not a problem, as long as we can prevent them from putting up barriers that would protect themselves from competition once they stagnate.
US arguably has the world's easiest access to venture capital. Compared to the US, venture capitalists in other countries tend to be more cautious, demanding much more equity for the same investment, and often much more interfering as well.
A low regulation, low corruption business environment. Trying to start something like SpaceX in many other countries, the government will force you into various inefficiencies – using politically favoured suppliers, etc. The US has comparably little of these problems.
Why not simply... follow the model that worked?
VC economics rely on a portfolio theory of a few gigantic winners making up for the other losses. So if different economic conditions creates a difference in the ultimate size of our 'winners' than you have to figure out how to have fewer (or smaller) losses.
It's a little goofy, but I have a personal hunch that the high level of sunlight in Silicon Valley help entrepreneurs there - as building companies is rough so it helps to persevere if it's always bright out.
(Background, I grew up in Boston, moved to Silicon Valley, and have tried to start companies with varying amounts of success.)
After years of living abroad, I've come to realize one thing about America and Americans. We're a bit more willing to risk it and fail. Sure, loads of people would rather have a secure job and not make risky decisions. Still, I think there's a higher concentration of those who will. Compared to lots of places on Earth.
Also, for many who immigrate here, there's kind of no choice but to risk it and try to do something bold and crazy to make it.
You're unaware that the US is one of the world's leading manufacturers of semiconductors?
For 2019 the US exported $44 billion worth of semiconductors. The third largest export for the US, behind airplanes ($130 billion) and oil ($152 billion for all oil products).
There are only a few major semiconductor manufacturing nations and the US is among them.
> Semi-Conductor doubling every 18 months
IIRC, the recent doublings have been happening in Taiwan. That's why people make such a big deal about TMSC. America (i.e. Intel) actually has some catching up to do.
> A whole industry bootstrapping itself to make semi-conductors doubling every 18 months, going from exotic, mission critical hardware to commodity;
Silicon Valley did not bootstrap itself. It received untold billions of dollars from the US government during the Cold War (and lots of stuff happened during the WW2 economy, when the US was the Allies' armorer). Do you think it a coïncidence that most spy satellites are launched from Vandenberg? Or that Skunk Works, located in California, developed so many secret aircraft?
Do a search for "The secret history of Silicon Valley":
* https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
> SpaceX is doing the same thing with flight hardware.
Notwithstanding the millions that NASA gave them in their early stages.
* https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/news/COTS_selection.html
The list of spinoff technologies just from NASA is impressive:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
The fact that the US was, post-WW2, the largest economy in the world, and the main developed nation that didn't see mass destruction, certainly didn't hurt.
The fact that the US government throws a lot of money around certainly helps private industry:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State
This also does not diminish the entrepreneurs that, once the baton is handed to them, charge forward. My main argument is that there's not as much "bootstrapping" as many people believe.
And the billions spent on the technologies that allow those engines to exist. SpaceX didn't invent rocket engines. It stands on the shoulders of many giants going back through Apollo to the early days. There are even traces of Soviet tech in the raptor (ie closed cycle). Nearly all of that work was funded by taxpayers ... and by whatever funded the soviet programs.
Building a better mousetrap is great, but that doesn't mean that all the previous mousetraps were not also great too.
Legitimate criticism of SpaceX fanboys is not "Pooping on the party". People who pretend that this is a ground-up space program, an icon of how private enterprise is always better at everything, need to be educated in the history of spaceflight. I myself could build a car in my garage that is better/faster/cheaper than everything available in decades past. That doesn't mean that I am one iota smarter, better organized or more innovative than the engineers who built those classic cars.
> better/faster/cheaper than everything
So do talking down SpaceX based on that makes no sense.
They kind of did invent full-flow engines though, which were an unattained holy grail of rocketry.
"Staged combustion (Замкнутая схема) was first proposed by Alexey Isaev in 1949. The first staged combustion engine was the S1.5400 (11D33) used in the Soviet planetary rocket, designed by Melnikov, a former assistant to Isaev.[1] About the same time (1959), Nikolai Kuznetsov began work on the closed cycle engine NK-9 for Korolev's orbital ICBM, GR-1. Kuznetsov later evolved that design into the NK-15 and NK-33 engines for the unsuccessful Lunar N1 rocket. The non-cryogenic N2O4/UDMH engine RD-253 using staged combustion was developed by Valentin Glushko circa 1963 for the Proton rocket."
And way down at the bottom of a long engine list spanning more than half a century...
"Raptor—SpaceX LCH4/LOX engine in development, first flown in 2019[19][20]"
(Yes, there are others listed, but SpaceX was first to actually fly something.)
That the IPD was hydrolox and didn't proceed to the point of a full engine, let alone a flight is besides the point.
What you said was: "They kind of did invent full-flow engines though", which is completely false.
The government gave $18B to the SLS and so far has vapor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
The government spent $211B on the shuttle program and got 133 launches. SpaceX will probably surpass that number this year at a fraction of the cost.
NASA's record on rockets since Apollo has been abysmal.
I don't think government is necessarily bad (the Russians did a much better job in recent decades!) but it leans into its failures and often has bad incentives. SpaceX fails fast, has great incentives, and has achieved an incredible amount on a (comparatively) shoestring budget.
I think we can all agree on those points. The point of the GP that I (and I think many others) react to is the "Only in America things like this can happen" part. I just don't get American exceptionalism I guess.
Saying that something "could only happen in America" (usually) indicates a view that America is somehow unique (as in the American exceptionalist view).
I'm not saying that America hasn't done great things, or that Americans shouldn't believe they have done great things. It's just that no country is unique in this manner, and Americans seem to often say they are in ways that I rarely see other countries do.
But occasionally I think it has some justification. And I think SpaceX is one of those rare cases. I just can't see a firm like SpaceX existing in any other country. The US offers a unique combination of easy access to capital, relatively low regulation, and high government funding for private space ventures, which I doubt you will find anywhere else.
Yes. And none of those things are historically unique.
They just happen to be true now in the US, partly because the US is the large economy in the world. But those things were true during different times in history in other countries.
Do you think it was a coïncidence that the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the UK, when they just happened to be one of the larger economies in the world at that time? Where did all the early research in electricity happened, in the US? Do you think Volta, Ampère, or Hertz are American names? Or the concept of interchange able parts (see the book The Perfectionists by Winchester)? Where was the internal combustion engine invented? The American space program was kickstarted by a bunch Germans.
Of course culture helps as well. Britain actually lost its initial lead in the chemical industry, even though things started there:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauveine
Fiddling with industrial chemicals was poo-pooed by the British intelligentsia, so the industry in Germany ended up surpassing Britain (e.g., BASF). See the book Mauve by Simon Garfield for a pretty good history on this:
* https://www.simongarfield.com/books/mauve/
It may be that the US has the go-go culture now that other countries used to have.
What is happening now in the US is a great thing, but to call "unique" is an insult to countless historical figures IMHO.
You're siting 0.1% historical outcomes when you look across all of the active civilizations across all of human history.
The conditions in the US currently, and Pax Americana more generally, are extremely rare in the history.
[1] Joel Moker's Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. I'd also highly recommend Moker's "The Gifts of Athena"
I never said it was historically unique, if by that you mean without any historical parallel. Of course if you look at other industries and other historical periods, you will see other cases where a certain industry in a certain country has pulled ahead. And US leadership in space (or any other industry) is not guaranteed to last forever, and is in fact unlikely to last forever. But the US does provide a supportive environment for private space entrepreneurship which is unique in the world today.
The US has both some unique strengths and unique flaws. It is a world leader in both the space industry and in mass incarceration. The first is something it can be proud of, and the second is something of which it should be ashamed. Neither lead is guaranteed to be permanent, so in neither way is it unique in an absolute historical sense, but in both ways it is unique relative to the world of today.
> Do you think Volta, Ampère, or Hertz are American names?
I feel like you are arguing, not against anything I actually said, but things you are imagining I said. I'm not an American. I'm perfectly capable of being critical of the US (there is much I could say on that topic) but I also think it has its strengths and SpaceX is evidence of some of them.
Having had a bit of a ground-level view of this going back over a decade, yes, America is exceptional in this respect. Lots of people tried to do private launch overseas. Trivial barriers like explosives licenses stopped most at the gate. The sole success stories are in the U.K. (Skyline) and New Zealand (Rocket Lab), with the former stretching the definition of "success." Meanwhile, America has SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and a trove of others.
The permissiveness and commercial latitude the U.S. government affords Americans is unique. The protections American law and culture afford private property is similarly quite extreme. These facets come with downsides. But in 2001, I can confidently say that had Elon started SpaceX anywhere but in America, it would have dismally failed.
Yes, SpaceX could only happen in the United States. But let't not pretend that the whole American package warrants the 'favored and exceptional nation' badge that so many seem to want to bestow on it, which is what this American exceptionalism is all about. Shining city on the hill and more of that kind of crap.
One cannot ignore that they did their later work here. Not there. As did many others whose own societies collapsed or otherwise failed them.
In any case, I’m arguing a narrow argument: that a company like SpaceX could only have been founded, when it was founded, in America. Because of its certain characteristics that are an exception in the set of the world’s cultures. (One among many: its unique ability to assimilate and positively appropriate from immigrants.) That doesn’t mean it’s faultless; that’s a straw man.
The US is not unique in that regard. Australia and New Zealand are very comparable in that way. Canada probably belongs in that list too.
I agree that, in the contemporary world, SpaceX could only have happened in the US. But that's because of economic factors (government funding for the space industry, easy and plentiful access to venture capital, a low regulation business environment.) That particular combination of economic factors is unique to the US. Being exceptionally welcoming to immigrants is rare but not unique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
In a more just world they would have stood trial in Nuremberg.
Or geopolitical concerns.
The multiple problems with Nauka suggest they've lost their edge and never learned the lessons from docking issues with Progress in the past.
SpaceX is/was just another entry on the long list of private contractors commissioned to build things for NASA, DoD, et al. But different here is that SpaceX worked at very very different speed than Aerojet Rocketdyne, ULA, and all the other old-space fossils. Still, those old contractors are valuable for other things — good welders, technicians, and engineers take many years to train and these old legacy corps provide a steady income stream to maintain a certain level of manufacturing readiness.
All created because the government wanted something done and was willing to cut a check:
I agree that the Space Shuttle had a cool factor that nothing else does.
The government (US taxpayers) were the ones that did the initial work to level the raw earth and pave the road. SpaceX may be doing amazing work improving the process, but comparing the two as you’re doing is not appropriate.
The they didn't. What nonsense. They just keep flying the same old stuff as the quality gets worse and they don't do anything new.
It's not a coincidence, it's geography.
It is desirable for reconnaissance satellites to cover the entire planet regularly. That means high inclination orbits. That means southward launches (as opposed to eastward). That requires a launch site with ideally lots of ocean and not a lot of population to the south/southeast.
The US does plenty of military launches into other orbits from the east coast.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
> SpaceX was first headquartered in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. By November 2005, the company had 160 employees.
> El Segundo is a city in Los Angeles County, California,
That's the only place you can launch a polar mission over ocean from the continental United States.
Wiki:
N1 LEO payload is ~95 t, weight 2750 t, height 105.3m
Starship LEO payload is 100~150 t, weight 5000 t, height 120m.
(Please, I'm not making a political point, I just cannot refrain from punning.)
You mean for the first test flight? Do you have a source?
Long term plan is definitely land landing, but I haven't seen anything about the first test flight.
I assumed that they would try and land it from the start, they've already landed starship a few times, and it seems like that's where a lot of the unknowns still are (e.g. they're apparently adjusting wing size down after the last landing)?
Article: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/13/spacex-outlines-plans-...
Video (Marcus House): https://youtu.be/9-9k513UIVw?t=298
Basically both vechicles (the massive booster and the starship itself (2nd stage) are going to "land" on the water, which means a hover and then sinking into the water.
Booster - Boost and separate, boostback burn and splashdown off the coast. Starship - 90 min orbit at about 120km, reentry and spashdown near Hawaii
It's fairly quite likely that both would crater on this first flight - for instance this is the first booster flight and also the first reentry for the starship itself.
The Falcon 9 booster also had similar flight plans until it could successfully fly a controlled trajectory to the surface of the ocean before they risked a drone ship too.
Although, I'm not sure about that "then sinking into the water" part. There are big LO2 and methane tanks and If they are empty enough and closed, both Starship and Booster shouldn't sink. I guest, we'll see it soon.
But part of it will be underwater, initially the very expensive flamey part (engines). They will not "be the same" after the experience.
They also don't yet have any drone ships capable of landing the Starship or booster.
But yes, it'll very much "prove it can more or less land" prior to actually giving them anything (breakable) to land on.
Perhaps explaining GP's surprise: I've heard SpaceX's testing philosophy contrasted against this sort of thing. That none of their tests are "too big to fail". On the other hand, according to this narrative they also stress iteration speed over success rate, and ramping up fast works to that end too.
Maybe they were getting diminishing returns (in terms of lessons learnt) in small scale tests though. No doubt there are phenomena you only see in larger tests, and (as you say) their confidence in getting the smaller stuff right might be quite high.
I'll bet they're going to remove all 29 of these engines and re-attach them again later. I would expect they want much more testing than they've done to date (for example, pressure testing the tanks -- they have not done that with this booster, BN4, according to Reddit).
https://www.space.com/starship-super-heavy-engine-section-ph...
Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure.
Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354862567680847876
There are plenty of industrial/mining sites that argue they need to be able to create huge hazard dumps for the sake of the future of the human race. It tends to be a very poor argument for those left holding the bag when the owners have taken their money and skipped town.
If the danger is so great that we have to get off this planet in the next five years or we all die, well, then we might justify more urgency. If we've got 10 or 20 years to do it, let's take the time to protect the environment while we do it.
If you want to argue that none of this bureaucracy is protecting the environment, that's a different argument.
Criticizing regulators is Elon's MO, whether it is the SEC for his Tweets, various transportation departments for self driving software safety, labor departments for covid restrictions for worker safety, FAA for rocket launches... You'd think there is some national conspiracy against him at this point.
And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple things can be done by humanity at once.
edit: apologies for the first sentence here which was unnecessary to make my point.
There's plenty of orgs doing worthwhile and important space exploration.
There's a bunch of individuals destroying this planet who want to go to space and are selling a nice colonists fantasy to get backing.
You're right that it's not either or: let's continue supporting viable space efforts. But let's not be naive about it.
This particular thread of comments is specifically about Mars colonisation.
OP: > The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction.
You're arguing with nobody's point.
> There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
Which directly states that problems should be worked on serially - that space travel should be worked on AFTER we solve other problems.
It's fine to state your own reading of what they said and respond in kind, but dictating that your reading is universal when your comment is directly under evidence that it is not is a big leap.
If you insist on using 3rd party interpretation rather than 1st party intent to decide the meaning of a statement, I've got 16 upvotes on my comments here so others seem to be reading it the same as I.
But we don't need to vote to understand what "until after" means. It's not esoteric philosophical language - my 6 year old would understand it.
"Argument by upvote" is weak, especially in a forum where I can't actually see your comments vote totals.
Also, you are not the first party, so why do you feel so confident in being able to claim sole interpretation of "1st party intent."
They clearly meant that that space colonization was such a far off goal, that the difference in intensely focusing on it and moderately focusing on it won't cause measurable differences in our lifetime.
Or they didn't, I'm not a mind-reader, but I've given just as much evidence to back up that claim as you have yours.
If you want to make it into a discussion about comparing & contrasting impacts, you're going to have to take the collective impacts of those pushing the space-colony agenda: everything from perpetuating individual road transport & UK airline companies to the largest "bookstore" in the world and lots in between.
Space exploration is an extremely important and worthy scientific endeavour & orgs like NASA have been criminally underfunded for decades.
What is absolutely not worthwhile and shouldn't even uttered in the same breath as the history of efforts on ISS and similar, is a bunch of budding space cowboys sending phallic representations of themselves into orbit on PR missions and hiding their own destructive impact on our planet behind a colinist fantasy so thin only a complete scientific illeterate would fall for it.
SpaceX has contributed positively to benign public missions by being a contractor, but all the marketing bullshit outside of that around Mars is demonstrably nonsense.
> a bit of critical thinking
Indeed.
Like do people really think that there's better shapes to go with? And if people really believe this, what part of our public education system failed them most? Because my money is on critical thinking.
Fwiw, I'm at least glad that single word seems to be the only part of the comment above you found objectionable.
Face it man, people making fun of dick shaped rockets are seeing dicks where no one else is seeing them and calling themselves clever.
Fwiw the space plane I was referring to above was SS2, not a NASA vehicle. But yes, I agree, it is unlikely to be good for doing "real work in space". Which is the actual substantive point here, irrespective of vehicle shape.
Just to repeat since you seem to have missed it in my comment above: the phallic comment was not, I repeat NOT a literal commentary on rocket design. Yes, good rockets are long and cylindrical. Not what I was referring to.
Totally unnecessary. That gratuitous dig doesn't advance your argument at all.
> What about all the resources going into video games, sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc?
That doesn't seem like it's u/paxys issue to address. The person they responded to made a _very_ strong claim: "The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket".
It seems entirely consistent with both the original argument and the reply that humans could have two very important jobs to address (climate change, and becoming multi-planetary) and still have resources to dedicate to all those other things you describe.
> Do you make the same tired comments when those industries are brought up?
I would make a similar argument that u/paxys made if the amusement park industry claimed that building amusement parks was the single most important job that humanity had. Similarly, for sports, video games movies, or most other industries. Claiming the mantle of "the most important job humanity has" is a very big claim.
> And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple things can be done by humanity at once.
u/paxys didn't say that we could only address one thing at a time. They were disagreeing with the claim that becoming multiplanetary is the single most important job humanity has. Disagreeing with which singular job we have is the "most important" one makes absolutely no claim as to how we should be dividing our time.
Ultimately, I actually agree with the original poster that becoming multiplanetary and multistellar is an important feat we should be aggressively perusing. But I also think surviving any extinction-event filters that may come along the way is equally important.
Good point, I should have restrained myself here.
The rest of your comments would be fair, except that u/paxys said the following:
> There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
Which clearly indicates that we should not be working on space travel until AFTER we've solved humanity's problems.
I didn't read it as indicating that we should fully postpone humanity's problems. For example, the next few sentences read:
> The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generations and centuries.
That indicates to me that the delay the person is considering is on the order of the delay imposed by FCC regulations (i.e. months or years), not "start working on it after we've solved humanity's problems".
But that's just how it reads to me
> The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
And they're simply unable to come to any understanding, after decades of botched discourse.
I don't see how some group of people focusing on space travel as a way to potentially divert the end of humanity as something that bad
I think you lack some self-awareness here. Space is clearly a mild curiosity to you at most.
I think it's extremely unhelpful to tell people what their interests are, or what they believe. How much could you possibly know about this person's interests from that one post?
He has a lot of talent at his disposable, and presumably information to a decent bit of otherwise locked away studies/reports. Do I think he is correct? Perhaps not, but my nor your opinion really matters.
If he's made the decision shits truly FUBAR, ala Foundation, then leave him alone while he works on what he may genuinely believe to be a shot at surviving the FUBAR long-term.
Soooooo. It's probably not vaporware homie.
Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.
We can't "wait" for anything, or the window during which we can develop space travel will close. 10 or 100 years from now we might no longer have the motivation or the means to fund and build new vechicles like these.
Wasn't one of the disasters in Simcity 2000 having your power-beaming space laser miss your power station instead light your city on fire? It seems like such a thing would cause massive hazards.
> Move people into real orbital habitats.
> Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.
Or force people to live deep underground. Then when they save up enough money to buy a ticket, they can be transported there much more economically.
As for me, I like living on the surface.
Dial that up tenfold and I suspect you’ll be fine - especially with the plant in the desert (nothing to burn)
1GWh/y/ha. That’s a 4,000 ha requirement for the US electrical needs, about 10 square miles.
Good luck dealing with the absence of cheap oxydizer and the lack of convection which makes heat dispersion a nightmare.
> Move our power generation into space and beam it down.
Our power is already generated in space, and beamed down to us. It also comes with no infrastructure cost, which is truly an engineering wonder when you think of it.
If industry had to pay launch costs for water, air, and other basic things they need, they wouldn't be financially viable.
If we then pointed out that in space or on the surface of a lifeless rock there are no costs of pollutants there might be a bit of incentive to move.
But you are correct, those companies would need to be self-sufficient in gathering all resource inputs and be able to ship finished products back where they are wanted. Much more complex than renting an industrial unit in an industrial town.
> The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction.
Aren't these two sides of the same coin? If we colonise Mars, but leave Earth a smoking ruin, then we've made things worse by trading a planet with a function biosphere for one without. If we wait till Earth is in perfect state before colonising another planet, we'll never leave, and be subject to many of the same risks.
If it were at all easy or probable then there would be other players in the space. There aren’t. If you contribute to the friction that opposes spacexs forward progress then you bear the responsibility for working against the things that you claim to love as a self proclaimed nerd.
There were people who put on demonstrations against wealthy people spending their money on being patrons for scientists and early biologists. It was very unpopular for rich people to sponsor nonsense, the collection of random fluids and samples. All of which is the basis for modern biology and medicine. So which side of history are you going to be on? The idiotic mob or the people making things better?
1: https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/04/photos-long-march-rock...
The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all seem unstable to me.
When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in correcting the problem.
We are going to need far more advanced technology than we have today if we are going to reverse the effects of climate change. If we move heavy industry to space that can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions here on Earth. The technology to do that may also lead to breakthroughs in other areas like energy generation or storage.
I run thousands of hours of batch data processing jobs a day. They aren't particularly time sensitive, as long as they finish in a day I am happy. There's no reason the computers doing that need to be on Earth consuming precious water and electricity resources.
This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone through. In my early 20s I was much more sympathetic to what I'd now call naive libertarianism. Today I realize there's no magic bullet, and you need healthy leadership in both the private and public spheres. Ideally the two buttress each other against their individual flaws. However in the US the process of regulatory capture has hijacked this ideal.
We won't be able to fix it unless we vote in politicians who see this as a top priority. We get the quality of government we ask for.
Perhaps that's true, but space launches are important enough that going "slowly"[1] is a good idea. One catastrophic accident with the destruction of a spacecraft leaving a large amount of orbital debris would make space launches much, much harder until we clean up. Rushing to space could slow us down a lot.
[1] The space race has only been going for 70 years, and less than 25 years commercially. The idea that anything is happening "too slowly" is quite baffling really.
A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket".
Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a huge industrial base already existing in order to keep, let alone advance, our current technological level. And Mars is not friendly enough to support us with lower tech.
Our intuitions go the way of "we can put 1000 smart people there, that's enough to survive and thrive". Well, we as a species can't move our microprocessor factories from Taiwan in less than a decade, and you expect them to be rebuilt on Mars from scratch?
It seems to me that our level of technology has increased, partly through new discoveries, partly through new ways of applying those discoveries, but also at least partly through increased specialization. You've got a farmer growing huge amounts of food. But that's because there's a tractor factory, and the tractors are smart because of the chips in them, and the chips connect to the GPS satellites in orbit. To make that work, you need more than the farmer. You need the workers in the tractor factory, but also the workers in the chip plant in Taiwan, and the chip factory needs the equipment manufacturer in the Netherlands. And you need the rocket manufacturers so you can put GPS satellites in orbit. And the rocket fuel manufacturers. And so on. It basically has taken a globally integrated material culture to achieve that level of productivity on the part of the individual farmer. Which we can do, because the farmers are so productive that we don't have to spend very many people on farming.
A fair chunk of the progress of the last 200 years has been made possible by increasing scales of integration. But I worry, because we're running out of globe to integrate. (Africa, maybe?)
So, back to Mars. Yeah, none of this proves that 1000 people couldn't be self-sustaining. But for them to do that, they'd need a fair amount of tools. And that means that they'd need someone who knows how to repair and/or replace every one of those tools (and any tools they use in the process). And there's a hard cutoff below which they cannot fall, due to the need for oxygen. They can't just fall back to being hunter-gatherers.
So, yeah, I didn't debunk it. But, seriously, what's the maximum number of sophisticated kinds of machines that 1000 people can run and maintain? 100? 500? Can you build a self-sustaining colony on Mars with only 500 kinds of machines?
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11hYo9UTSRM
And the corresponding book:
How To Industrialize Mars: A Strategy For Self-Sufficiency: How To Settle A Lethal Vacuum In 400 Easy Steps
Part of the whole project of Mars is making this very thing possible in the first place. It requires rethinking a lot of how we do things.
There are quite a few steps to proper, long term self-sufficiency. You need the colonists to get there, to form a permanent settlement, to get to reasonable numbers, to make a place where people would want to raise families into, to get to a point where it has a balanced trade deficit and so on.
Everything up to here is mostly science fiction material, but if Musk lives long enough it might actually happen.
Now, from this point you need a nation-sized colony on Mars make a strategic decision to duplicate critical infrastructure on Mars just to be self-sufficient. This is the step that the OP with his panicked "must not put all eggs in the same basket let the rockets fly now" is not even aware it exists. As an order of magnitude is probably at least equal to everything up to then. Partly because it's objectively hard, and also because when you have a nation-sized bunch of people, you have to convince them to invest half their resources to build factories that will make microprocessors that by the time you finish will be more expensive than those imported from earth, and probably also obsolete. And you have to keep investing in such obsolete industries because a million people can't compete with 10 billion that don't have to manufacture their air. Multiply this for every domain where you need such critical high-tech industries, like medical.
It would be in the near future, true. In fact, the key milestone for humanity being truly multi-planetary is that each planet must be independently self-sufficient.
There's no laws of physics that would prevent human life on Mars or Venus from eventually becoming self-sufficient.
The time-frames to get to that point are large (mid-hundreds to low-thousands of years by my random guess). A thousand years isn't that long in terms of the evolution of the species, though, and are the time scales we should be thinking of multiplanetary life on.
They have really not been slowed down that much FAA.
So everybody should just chill out.
Btw, for people interest, this interview with Ken Davidian FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation is interesting:
https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/podcast/episode/90af4411/2...
This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket.
While neither agreeing or disagreeing, I will note another very important thing SpaceX is doing:
"The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad."
A lot of what SpaceX is doing is extremely inspirational, and I think the world could use more things to look forward to in the future.
It's always presented as a false dichotomy, though. We can have both.
People insist we should be spending our money fixing the planet, but we already are, including Musk who just sponsored the largest XPrize in history for a carbon sequestration method.
First we must overcome the political hurdles to get people to even recognize that climate change is a problem. Obviously money is only barely starting to trickle in to carbon sequestration tech.
1. Fuel-air explosions at ground level can injure people or destroy property (even kilometers away)
2. Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day
3. Lots of fuel is toxic, we need to mitigate this.
Basically someone has to walk through all the worst case scenarios and ensure that everyone (and nature) remains safe or as safe as it is possible to be.
Toxicity and polluting aspects of Rockets is of a negligible concern, Everyday Astronaut (Youtube fame) gets this so often that he did an entire hour long video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4
> Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day
Well darn.
We are very far from a self sustaining society and economy on Mars. Easily a century or more. I'm cheering on SpaceX, but find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions.
For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is political will/unity.
We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are directly possible, today, with no new invention.
But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more prudent than we are today.
What do you mean by "modern" medical care?
Do you think that will make a significant difference in life expectancy?
The difference between, say, Rwanda and the USA is less than ten years, I believe. Comparable to the gender gap in some countries like Russia.
What about the gap between countries like the USA and UK versus Japan at the top? Is that important to close?
(My info from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...)
Hans Rosling has been dead some years now, but used to do great talks going through the basic data and trends.
I'm not sure why you're adopting a tone of debate/rebuttal. Every problem you mention is something I think we should address exactly under what I said originally, whether its inequitable access to healthcare in the US, or straight up lack of modern facilities in low income nations.
That's a non sequitur
What are minimal capital and time requirements to do this eggs in more than one basket thing? Not talking about an orbiting space whatever but a real, sustainable ecology on another planet.
The depth of our ignorance even about whole classes of basic science there, notwithstanding the number and scale of engineering problems to solve....
Is there any reality where this isn't minimum a century and thousands to millions of $T?
For someone who believes this is the most urgent problem on which to spend capital and time, the most efficient target of advocacy energy has to be the US military which spends $700B a year, not the effing FAA and the relatively small scale projects of this one company- no matter how exciting and advanced they happen to be.
Even making the case for this program, when one considers what could be done with even a fraction of that scale of capital deployed on this planet....Fusion energy itself is probably a $10T investment, orders of magnitude less in money and time.
Space is cool but not for one femtosecond should anyone entertain any of this eggs in more than one basket nonsense.
“The point at which one says the goal is to make life multi-planetary, it means that we need to have a self-sustaining city on Mars,” Musk said. “That city has to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason whatsoever. Doesn’t matter why. If those resupply ships stop coming, does the city die out or not? In order to make something self-sustaining, you can’t be missing anything. You must have all the ingredients. It can’t be like, well this thing is self-sustaining except for this one little thing that we don’t have. It can’t be. That’d be like saying, ‘Well, we went on this long sea voyage, and we had everything except vitamin C.’ OK, great. Now you’re going to get scurvy and die—and painfully, by the way. It’s going to suck. You’re going to die slowly and painfully for lack of vitamin C. So we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the vitamin C there on Mars. Then it’s like, OK, rough order of magnitude, what kind of tonnage do you need to make it self-sustaining? It’s probably not less than a million tons.”
That’s not a precise number, of course. It’s a rough estimate. But Mars settlers will need vast quantities of stuff. The settlers will need to build an entire industrial base to mine the Red Planet, and there are many steps in mining. To make consumer products requires a huge infrastructure base to refine and shape materials. “I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” Musk said.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-pl...
Humans have been exploring forever. Why stop now?
Why is it so difficult to just accept that a single person can have both inspiration qualities that we should try to emulate and also grave moral failings we should learn from? No one is perfect and hardly anyone is purely evil either.
In the end humans are naturally curious, expansionist, greedy (to varying degrees). We've always been this way and so it's only natural for us to continue.
We've been described as a virus before, feels relatively accurate esp if we start planet and system hopping.
This wouldn't have been a problem in the past. You'd just shrug off the crazy explorers and write them off as soon to be dead. Now, evidence of their success and relentless progress is shoved in our face every day.
Specific impulse is the most obvious parameter of a rocket engine, but it's relatively less important for a first stage where thrust/weight is also a very important concern. Specific impulse depends on the chemistry, combustion cycle, combustion efficiency and nozzle design. There isn't any obvious reason why it would scale either way with engine size.
Thrust/weight is very important for engines on a first stage because of gravity losses. Imagine if the rocket sitting on the pad had a thrust/weight of just 1.1; that would mean that at liftoff 91% of the thrust would be wasted just countering gravity. You both want a high thrust/weight at liftoff and a small dry mass to give the second stage the most momentum possible at stage separation. High thrust also helps for reuse in making the burn time of the first stage shorter (for fixed specific impulse and propellant load), which means that at stage separation the first stage isn't too far downrange and is easier to return to the launch site.
Note that there's both the thrust/weight of the rocket as a whole, and of the engines themselves. The engines comprise a significant proportion of the first stage's weight, though, so looking at engine weight (and thrust to weight) is also useful. Consider the RS-25, Merlin 1D, and Raptor. Their specific impulses are 366s, 282s, and 330s (at sea level), so the RS-25 looks pretty good. But their thrust/weight ratios are roughly 60, 185, and 200 (target). The Merlin 1D was, I believe, the highest thrust-weight ratio liquid-fueled engine ever. This is one of the primary reasons, in addition to cost, it is considered so good, despite having such anemic specific impulse.
You can optimize thrust/weight several ways. Firstly, you can try to cram more thrust out of an engine of a fixed size. This is done by driving up chamber pressures as high as you can, which might be easier with a smaller engine due to square-cube scaling. Secondly, you can make the engine smaller, without changing its thrust, and try to cram as many of them in as possible. Consider thrust/area as another important metric -- for fixed rocket dimensions, being able to cram more engines into the base is an easy way to get more thrust and improve the total thrust/weight of the stack.
Another consideration, which has all too often been ignored in the rocketry business, is cost. More specifically $/thrust, if we're looking at a first stage. Here, smaller engines have a clear advantage in that your tooling doesn't need to be as large and expensive, and you're going to need more of them so you can start to leverage economies of scale rather than having each engine being an individual, artisan-produced artifact. That obviously has a limit -- there's a point at which more engines would make things more expensive, but judging from the thrust and cost of the Raptor, I would guess it's right around the optimal point.
Finally, it's worth noting that, all other considerations aside, going bigger in rocket engines tends to make the engineering more difficult. The square-cube law makes heat flux in the combustion chamber scale roughly linearly with engine size, which makes cooling more difficult. And the larger the combustion chamber, the more at risk it is of combustion instabilities. Look, for example, at the Russian RD-170 engine. It looks like four engines but is actually one engine with four combustion chambers. They did that because while it looks more complex, it actually makes things easier.
Replacement sats for what any get shot down in kinetic war.
100tn tungsten rods, or 100 1tn tungsten rods.
100 tons of cargo anywhere around the world in under an hour?
Many nukes, natch.
But, really, Starlink is the weapon you're thinking of: world-wide coverage, high-bandwidth, low latency, low cost military communications system. All the air assets, and maritime assets, all the boots on the ground, and all the drones, connected via a bog-standard Internet protocols (probably using VPNs and cryptography, naturally) and soon-to-be-commodity hardware.
The U.S. would be insane to not let SpaceX go on. The U.S. air force simply needs this.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/the-us-military-is-s...
(Honestly this is cool.)
NASA has selected the platform for supply to the Lunar Gateway.
SpaceX wants to use it to take humans to Mars.
But it's also a decent platform for just getting lots and lots of mass into LEO.
Apart from that, Musk is great at marketing and sometimes full of crap, but when you listen to some of his converstions it's not hard to believe that the Mars mission is earnestly what drives him.
Exceptions I can think off:
- military application, but they have their solutions
- on high seas, no idea how that works now
- regions maintaining ground stations is risky (war zones and so on)
Maybe I am wrong, but I have the impression Starlink is for SpaceX is what FSD is for Tesla, a way to "raise" money. And that is working. I am just not sure if I like it, since it would mean innovation success depends more on the founders ability to raise money than actual product market fit or profitability.
Most of my extended family lives in rural Tennessee where their internet options are still dial-up and 5G. Comcast isn't interested in laying additional fiber to remote houses. There are options through AT&T, but I think they end up paying close to $20/GB.
Several of my relatives are pretty pumped about StarLink as a potential option.
I think the niche for StarLink is this - outlying communities where traditional ISPs are uninterested in building out infrastructure for the 'long tails' of the population.
People and the necessary life support for people are quite massive compared to robots. Once one can get lots of mass to orbit, one can think about things like sending people past low earth orbit (around the moon, to the moon, or to Mars). So far, NASA has committed to sending people to the Moon, but no farther. Elon Musk says that the goal is Mars, but any craft which could be used to start a Mars colony also has the ability to start a much larger moon colony, or perhaps to land on the moon and take off again without leaving (expensive) parts of the rocket behind.
There is some applied science research, such as around methods for reentry, but the final goal is establishing human colonies.
Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s. Rockets are still expensive enough that you can't afford one unless you have a really valuable payload to launch.
Expensive but reliable rockets gave us useful things like communications satellites, GPS, and weather satellites. An order-of-magnitude reduction in launch costs may have given us slightly better satellite services (like Starlink) but nothing qualitatively different. Another order-of-magnitude reduction could plausibly bring bigger changes.
Eh, but upmass is significantly up, despite it taking less mass to do stuff in space and stuff lasting longer.
Not to mention that it may take a long time from launch getting cheaper for payload to really start to take advantage of it. If launch stays sustainably cheap, it may be time to start analyzing the economics of space power stations, etc, again, which were almost feasible with worse technology at much higher launch costs.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-pl...
I'm barely, just barely, partial to the argument that there should be a Mars colony so that humanity could go on even if we wiped ourselves out on Earth, but the challenge of an off-Earth colony is so great, I'm pretty reluctant we'll see anything successful in the next 50 years. Even once you figure out all the mechanics of building something in a high radiation/below freezing/basically no atmosphere environment, you have to figure out how to get a few dozen people to work together for _years_ without interpersonal conflicts destroying the whole mission.
Also, uh, why don't we just fix Earth? Oh, that's not sexy? No, of course not, because real problems are always more complicated than simple, inspirational ideas or a colony run by a dictator.
Fixing your run down car will never provide the same level of utility and redundancy that having two cars will. Preferably you do both.
If you live in a somewhat remote location, and your wife is pregnant and you know she needs to go to the hospital because of complications, you don't just make sure your somewhat run-down car is in better condition, and gassed up, you also make sure to find someone else in the area that you can rely on for a vehicle because it's that important. When it comes down it it, there are things important enough that you try to reduce thy impact random chance can have on it. Having all humans on Earth is one of those things to many people.
Suppose there were a Mars colony. How many years before that colony could go on indefinitely if it didn't have support from Earth?
So where's the better choice for redundancy?
> The difficulty, expense, and risk of setting up life on Mars absolutely pales in comparison to cleaning-up life on Earth.
First, that's irrelevant, as a sustainable colony on Mars provides something that you don't get no matter how much you clean up Earth. It can be pristine, it still doesn't get you redundancy.
Second, I don't think it's true that the price is so far in that direction. Cleaning up Earth is monumentally expensive as well, depending on what you even mean by that.
> Suppose there were a Mars colony. How many years before that colony could go on indefinitely if it didn't have support from Earth?
Sustainable in that it can produce the materials needed for modern living? I very long time, I imagine. Sustainable in that it provides enough food and water that a group of people could survive without having to worry about modern conveniences? Much less, and that's always got to be the first step, so that's what we go for.
Even if people on a mars colony ended up living a more simple existence in the case of the loss of Earth, that's still a chance for them to advance and continue that wouldn't exist with the world ending disaster on Earth.
That seems ... very far off. I dont necessarily disagree with setting a science mission up on Mars, but i'd strongly disagree with the notion that Mars is even a top priority for a diversification of baskets.
Also, the sooner you can get to Mars more reliable and more cheaply with larger payloads, the sooner that becomes a reality. Even if it never happens in my lifetime, that doesn't mean I think it's not worth working towards making all those things more real so it can be a reality at some point in time.
> i'd strongly disagree with the notion that Mars is even a top priority for a diversification of baskets.
Without even knowing specifically what you think would be a better choice, my guess is that cheaper, more reliable launch capabilities with bigger payloads will help that too.
Colonizing another planet 'is' a real problem?
Also, if we can 'just fix Earth' tell us how we convince all nations to come together and sing Kumbaya, put aside our resource differences and disarm all nuclear missiles (I'm looking at you North Korea)
If you’re truly interested to know the answer to this, you can find it aplenty online. And it’s not because it’s “sexy”.
Undertaking the risk of exploration has -- I would venture to say -- almost always had some economic, political, or military motive. Someone had to see some potential gain for the risk they were undertaking.
To be clear, I'm not frustrated at Elon for spending his money like this. I mean, if it were his money, because it's not. He's spending his investors' money, which he raises for himself by selling these ideas. I'm less excited by my government spending money on this, but, yes, it's not really that much.
What frustrated me more were the comments that appeared to be divorced from reality about what space exploration will bring.
There's not a single comment in this thread that does anything of the sort.
> He's spending his investors' money
All large, institutional investors that invest not because of some hypothetical Mars colonization, but because SpaceX is dominating the launch market, including government contracts, and has a potentially very large upcoming revenue stream with Starlink.
In terms of any sort of GDP comparison, space activities and employee numbers are a tiny, tiny fraction of economic output, so I really fail to understand such complaints.
Quote aside, I haven't found the heavy industry statement you seem to be talking about. Is it about that Bezos tweet or whatever? There's some great promising manufacturing techniques in zero-g, but it seems incredibly obvious sending anything in space or low orbit now and in the near future requires expending more energy than whatever its refinement or manufacturing will be worth. Furthermore, no, you can't fix Earth now. The only possible way to achieve that is eradicating humanity. Don't start talking about war, famines or whatever without imagining the disastrous consequences they may have (overpopulation, et cetera). The best humanity can do is continue experimenting and developing new technologies to at least improve the lives of the majority of people.
I find this level of optimism completely unwarranted. Plenty of people have died trying to go places they hadn't gone to before, or if they simply had to leave where they were. Explorers, places with overpopulation, refugees, I mean, the list really goes on.
> Furthermore, no, you can't fix Earth now. The only possible way to achieve that is eradicating humanity.
I disagree, and I think this is far too pessimistic. Food security, climate change, politics, all huge, huge problems, but there's real progress being made on all those fronts.
Go ahead and start "fixing earth" then, you're free to do so if you think it is "sexy". Meanwhile others will work on launching rockets, a task they seem to be quite adept at. Also, drop the nonsensical references to a "colony run by a dictator" or at least explain what made you write that piece of prose.
Humankind needs a frontier to strive towards, this has always been the case and will probably remain so. There used to be many frontiers but technology has developed as such a rapid pace that they're starting to become quite rare. A fully reusable space launch system has the potential to open up space exploration to a far larger extent than the current - soon to be previous - generation of expendable launch vehicles did. This is a good thing since it gives people something positive to look forward to instead of all the negatives which are being pumped in their heads by the media, politicians and, yes, by individuals like you who deal in negatives like "wiped ourselves out on Earth", "a colony run by a dictator", "There is literally no. point. at. all".
As said, feel free to "fix the Earth" but may I suggest framing this in a more positive and inspiring way? If you hit the right tone - yes, tone is important - you might inspire others who might inspire even more people. You may be able to open a new frontier that way, just like people like Musk do by working on reusable launch systems. Negativity and sour grapes do not inspire others, people who want that can simply watch a political debate.
I don't think it's sexy, at all. It's hard work, but it's also necessary.
> "colony run by a dictator"
A space colony is a pretty harsh environment. I'd be that it'll tend toward harsh, centralized leadership sooner rather than later, but, you know, maybe I'm wrong on that. In my defense, the things that make democracy possible -- plentiful resources, some level of societal trust, public safety -- are not going to be plentiful on Mars.
> Humankind needs a frontier to strive towards, this has always been the case and will probably remain so.
Agreed.
> There used to be many frontiers but technology has developed as such a rapid pace that they're starting to become quite rare.
Disagree. It is still the case that every question we answer in science leads to two more. Now, granted, not everyone needs/wants/can be a scientist.
> As said, feel free to "fix the Earth" but may I suggest framing this in a more positive and inspiring way?
Yeah, I probably should've, that would've probably been more convincing.
Now I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion that it'd be cheaper, but just that it maybe can be.
There are things that you just can't do on Earth because of gravity. And if price of putting things into orbit goes down it will open door to a lot of innovations in space manufacturing and within a decade it will have it's first "killer app". I can bet on it.
> no amount of rocket development will ever overcome those physics
This is simply not true. Your saying sounds like "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible". There's way more resources outside of our gravity well than inside of it and moving things from space to earth is cheaper than other way around. Yes, moving all heavy industry to space is complicated and very expensive, but it will be eventually done.
What am I missing here?